Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Family Tech Support

1. Get 'em a Mac with OS X on it
2. Get 'em broadband: it's fast and nearly always on
3. Get 'em Firefox, 'cause IE is bad for your security
4. Get 'em a good start page like My Yahoo or Google 5. Get 'em on Web Mail like Yahoo Mail or GMail 6. Get 'em on Flickr if they want to share photos
7. Get 'em on Instant Messenger (I'd recommend AIM or Yahoo Messenger) and/or Skype 8. Don't get 'em a blog"

Haaaa! Well... I wish I could support #1 fully, but with Evil Bill ruling the world, Windoze boxes are generally easier for the non-computer-literates to use - if only in terms of the wide availability of software at practically every retail joint in the known world.

I super-agree with everything else - except #8! Blogs are fun! :)

To that list - I'd add, switch 'em over to Vonage broadband phone service to go with that new internet connection. That's what I'm doing for my mom!

3 comments:

Yup I am an avid Firefox user. Love it. Best features: tabbed browsing (no more cluttered taskbar at the bottom of your screen). Ability to bookmark a bunch of pages and open them into multiple tabs with one click. For example - I have one bookmark group called "hockey" and when I click it, all of my hockey news sites are loaded. I have another called "work" and when I click it, all of my work email/online classroom/etc sites come up. Built in Google search bar rocks the house. Tons of addons to extend the browser's functionality. One loads the week's weather forecast into the bottom bar of the browser. Another lets me highlight anything on a web page and right-click a menu option to automatically open my blog. (Not sure if it works with LJ - I know it works with Blogger).

And the best part - Firefox is invulnerable to all the spyware crap that gets loaded into Microsoft IE. And it has a built-in popup blocker that works extremely well. :)